Steve Marose, a former US Air Force officer who was discharged for being gay and served time in prison for consensual sex, said he had long hoped to one day be pardoned.
“I can pretend, ‘Oh, I’m resilient,’ you know, ‘I get this,’ but at the end of the day, it’s traumatic,” Mr. Marose told the BBC.
He was one of thousands of people convicted on Wednesday, after US President Joe Biden announced that he would pardon those convicted under military laws that have banned gay sex for more than 60 years. year.
Mr. Biden described the pardon as “correcting a historic wrong.”
“I’m glad that day has come,” Mr. Marose said.
He and other veterans were convicted under a provision of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that criminalized sodomy from 1951 to 2013.
The United States Congress repealed the law banning consensual sodomy in 2013.
This military provision differs from President Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which banned gay and lesbian Americans from serving openly in the military.
In a statement Wednesday, President Biden said he was “using [his] has the clemency authority to pardon many former soldiers who were convicted solely because of themselves.”
“We have a sacred duty to all of our service members – including our brave LGBTQ+ members: to properly prepare and equip them when they are in danger and to care for them and their families when they return home,” he said.
US media reported that about 2,000 people may receive clemency according to the president’s announcement.
The proclamation will now allow those affected to apply for amnesty certificates, after which service members can have their discharge status changed.
This will make them eligible for veterans benefits that may have been denied in the past, although it is unclear how long this process will take.
Mr. Marose said his conviction in the late 1980s affected his life in many ways.
“It was a felony record,” he said, adding that it once cost him his job at the police department despite scoring very high in interviews.
“They do background checks every time I change jobs, and I have to dig it all back up and show them this is the truth, this is the accusation, this is the result,” Mr. Marose said. “I feel uneasy about that matter.”
A conviction also means difficulties in getting rental applications accepted and restrictions on international travel.
“I can’t get into Canada because they don’t care what your sentence is,” Mr. Marose said.
This, he said, was in addition to having to pay back the military for his college tuition and cut his Air Force career short.
Sodomy was illegal between members of the US military even with mutual consent until former President Barack Obama legalized same-sex relationships through the National Defense Authorization Act a decade ago. last century.
Mr. Obama also abolished the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2011 and allowed gay and lesbian soldiers to serve openly in the armed forces.
ONE CBS News reports an estimated 100,000 LGBT military members were kicked out of the US military between World War II and the abolition of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.
Sarah Kate Ellis, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, welcomed the move in a social media post.
“It is an important signal not only to the thousands of brave LGBTQ Americans who deserve better to defend our country, but to everyone who understand that diversity, respect and inclusion are American values.”
There are approximately 79,000 LGBT individuals serving in the US military as of 2022, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.
